Poor old Sony was hammered by both media and its own users earlier this year, after news broke of a large-scale hacking of its PlayStation Network. And now it's happened again.

The latest case involves Sony detecting a mass attempt to sign in to PSN accounts with a job-lot of user names and passwords, which the company says it believes may have been obtained through a third-party rather than extracted from PSN itself. Fortunately, the "overwhelming majority" of user name and password combinations failed.

However, Sony believes approximately 93,000 accounts (33k in Europe) have been compromised, with outsiders able to correctly sign in to PlayStation Network using the stolen data. Those accounts have now been "temporarily locked" pending a new password reset and account validation scheme.